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Meet Pascal, the Blind Applying Champion of Deloitte

Hear it from the champion! Learn more about Pascal's experiences as an intern at the Deloitte Garage in Mannheim.

"The team at Deloitte left behind a great impression. I am really looking forward to the upcoming time with them and the experiences from Deloitte's project approaches."

Get to know Pascal better

Name: Pascal

Age: 20

Study Track: Bachelor of Science Aviation Management

Semester: 6th Semester

University: EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht

Internship start and end: June 1, 2016 – September 2, 2016

Function: Consulting, The Garage

Hobbies: Swimming, sailing, photography, travelling

I applied for "Blind Applying", because….

...with the program, I had the opportunity to get in touch with a number of interesting companies at once to test and discover, for which company my profile is actually attractive. Hence, I am very pleased that I received a reply from Deloitte to work for the “The Garage” – a function, which meets my present experiences and interests.

I am especially looking forward to/ am anxious to…

...meet the team and get to know the innovations on which I will work during my time at The Garage. I am also very anxious to experience Mannheim for the first time. Even though I have never been there, I already heard a lot about the city.

I took with me to Mannheim:

A big suitcase, which surprisingly fitted all my important things. Perhaps I might also take a drone with me to once experience Mannheim from a different point of view.

Pascal's Start at Deloitte Garage

What new experiences are you looking forward to while working at Deloitte?

The upcoming internship is different from my experience so far, because I have the chance to work on highly relevant and innovative projects. I am really looking forward to learning more about current market developments in this segment and to work together with small, as well as large businesses. I guess the approach to the different projects might be entirely different from each other. I am also happy to spend this time together with an outstanding team, which I have already gotten to know during my interviews at Deloitte.

What is your pro tip when it comes to consulting and client relations?

Being open minded and interested in learning something new is probably my tip for consulting. I think it helps to build relations with the team as well as the client. Consulting is not only about delivering presentations to the client. It is mostly about interaction and questioning the current status of one’s business. Hence, I am convinced that an unbiased approach and the motivation to discover new value for the client is beneficial to maintain high motivation - even in stressful projects.

Favourite meal to prepare after a day at work?

I am pretty much a fan of having a barbecue - especially in the summer. Maybe some grilled steaks, sausages, or vegetables. I like a lot of things like this. However, what I like the most about having a barbecue is to invite friends over for dinner. I think it is a great opportunity to meet casually and spend the evening together. Plus, you can have a barbecue anywhere. I am really looking forward to testing the grill at the Rhine during my internship in Mannheim.

Pascal's first month @ Deloitte Garage

What is your first project about? Has there been a challenge you encountered? What new insight have you learned?

It has been almost a month now since I joined Deloitte in the Garage and everything is going great. Even though I do not want to think about the end of the internship yet, I have to realize, that about a third is already over. Time is running with the same pace we work on our solutions and formalize our business. I could not tell on how many things I have worked yet, however, the number of folders on my desktop tells me, it has been a lot of different topics! The Garage is definitely a welcoming place to work at – enjoyable workplaces, a fun and smart team, tangible innovative projects.

What do you like the most about it?

I appreciate a lot that I have been treated as a full member of the team starting day one. When I opened my laptop for the first time, I was happy to see that I already got introduced to the entire team. My time at Deloitte got kicked-off with four starter days at headquarters in Düsseldorf, where I had the chance to meet a lot of new and interesting people – surprisingly numerous from the same department, some from my home university, and also one person I now have the chance to work with.

What are your days like in Mannheim?

So how is Mannheim doing? So far, no barbecue at the Rhine and I have not been to the city center yet. But still, it is the football European championships, which are always worth to watch somewhere in Mannheim and a colleague recently took me to an event of our university’s alumni association where I got to know the start-up culture of the city – also a great opportunity.

I am excited to tell you a lot more about my time at the Deloitte Garage. Until next time!

New Learnings & Insights

It has been a great month since the last post. In the meantime, I was happy to travel to some of the major cities in Germany and I received a lot of interesting and versatile tasks. Additionally, I had various opportunities to interact with the team even more, may it be during a team event in Munich or some joint working days in Cologne or Düsseldorf. Also, I could enhance my experience in client interaction and developing approaches to certain focus topics. Overall, a month stuffed with new learnings and insights.

I want to start with the last-mentioned topic: client interaction and other topics. Our team dedicates itself to identifying up-to-date innovation and transferring it to client use-cases. Pretty early during my internship, I could join one of these groups and was finally lucky enough to be involved in the preparation of a client workshop. In course of the preparation, we jointly developed the relevant documents and approaches for our client. It was especially interesting, that we have chosen a different approach in contrast to classical power point presentations. During the workshop, we gave the client the possibility to practically experience and play with the innovation we were proposing him. In addition, we enriched the experience by choosing the Deloitte Greenhouse as our location – a place in Berlin, which encourages idea generation and interaction in a playful way. It seems as if consulting is changing in some way from solely showing solutions in PowerPoint to entire workshop setups where participants can interact with the proposed solutions.

Even though it has been a busy month, of course, the time was not exclusively dedicated to work only. Recently, we met a part of our team in Düsseldorf to discuss some of the newest topics together and to develop our solutions based on that. However, we also had a number of fun conversations about humorous things which have occurred to us recently. Additionally, the meeting took place in our Design Studios, probably the most amazing office I have seen yet – large open spaces, a barista coffee machine, and gadgets such as swings.

Earlier last month, we had a team event, where the entire DCI Garage team came together in Munich. It has definitely been another highlight of this internship as we were playing Bubble Football and had a joint dinner at a local brewery. I personally found it a great way to get to know my colleagues even better apart from work.

Retrospectively, I learned a lot in the last weeks and I am happy to be part of this team.

Reflection on Experience

A couple of weeks have passed and my internship at Deloitte has ended in the meantime. In my final post about my internship at the Deloitte Garage, I won’t extensively talk about my last duties at Deloitte but rather want to use the opportunity to do a wrap-up of my time at this outstanding team. Overall, I got a lot of responsibility right from the beginning which altogether with frequently changing topics decisively shaped my experience in this internship. As I stated beforehand, this would not have been possible without a team, which is characterized by teamwork, professionalism, trust, and a fair portion of fun.

Working with some of the latest pieces of technology and being able to present them in workshops, which I could largely structure independently was probably among the things which I valued most during that time. It was our goal to make innovation approachable for our clients, which was a really interesting part of my internship. Jointly, we developed new formats to encourage deep conversations and discussions about definite applications of predefined innovation topics. I guess that the development and use of formats, which are different from the experiences I made in previous internships, specifically are a key take away from the last three months. Additionally, it has always been an open question to me, how innovation, in detail, is linked to new business models and which factors in specific are relevant when assessing innovation. I am convinced, that this question has been exhaustively answered.

In the week before I left, our team met again in Düsseldorf to celebrate the achievements of the last months. Since we have been quite a large number of interns and working students supporting the team, this was also an occasion to again spend some time together before some of us returned to university to finish their studies. I think we all were happy and similarly surprised when the team handed a signed version of a book we have frequently been using and a t-shirt of the Deloitte Garage to us – from my point of view one of the moments, which will definitely remain in my mind.

Retrospectively, the Deloitte Garage is a place, which values creativity and openness towards new topics and approaches. We worked on quite a number of topics and mutually exchanged the latest trends on the market with each other. Similarly, flat hierarchies and a lot of responsibility even in entry positions or as an intern shape an encouraging and fast-paced working environment – maybe almost similar to a startup. I think that people who like to work with creative solutions on a high quality standard will definitely have fun in such an environment.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this last blog entry: it has been an inspiring time together with great people. At this point I again want to thank the team and Blind Applying for facilitating this internship.

Cheers!

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